Today's Take: Festival offers varieties of beer as it was meant to be

Oct. 25, 2013

Titletown Brewing Company will be among the many brewers at BrewFest this Saturday at the KI Convention Center / File/Press-Gazette Media

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Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

The Internet often attributes that quote to Benjamin Franklin. I’ve also read on the Internet that Franklin said nothing of the sort, so either way, the Internet has it right.

But here’s my frank corollary to the Franklin quote/misquote: If God wanted to give us a beverage to make us happy, he wouldn’t have put the responsibility of producing it into the hands of enormous, soulless corporations that have changed it into that boring, watery stuff that passes for beer nowadays.

This is why BrewFest is cool. The event, which takes place from 6 to 10 p.m. Saturday at the KI Convention Center, is a major fundraiser for the Bay Area Humane Society.

It’s a great way to sample beer the way a benevolent and loving god maybe would have wanted: as produced by craftsmen, artisans and amateurs.

The captains of industry who produce most U.S. beer have practiced on generations of Americans until they could come up with not the best but the least objectionable beer possible, the most profitable, the beer guaranteed to sell the most, not because it appeals to the largest possible number of people but because it offends the fewest.

That’s all well and good. It’s capitalism at its finest. It just isn’t beer at its finest. If it were, the manufacturers wouldn’t need girls in bikinis or cuddly Clydesdale horses to sell their stuff, nor would they depend on new-fangled flip-tops and fluted bottle necks to attract our attention.

BrewFest is a celebration of the renaissance that brewing has undergone in the last 30 years.

If you haven’t bought tickets already, it’ll cost you $45 at the door or $60 for the VIP treatment. The $45 will get you bottomless samples of some 250 craft beers plus access to some excellent pub food from the likes of Bake My Day, Café Naturally, St. Brendan’s Inn, Stadium View and others. The VIP price will get you in an hour early, give you access to about a half-dozen more beers and allow you to eat food made by the people of Slow’s BBQ of Detroit, a place so good Adam Richman named it among the 12 best places to eat across America.

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From the nationally known craft brewers like Sierra Nevada and Sam Adams to Green Bay’s own little home brewers’ club, the Green Bay Rackers, all will be there to show what beer was like before big business got ahold of it.

Standing alongside some of Wisconsin’s finest — New Glarus, Lakefront, Capital, Central Waters, O’so, to name a few — will be Titletown and Hinterland, holding up Green Bay’s contributions to the art.

Also representing Green Bay: Brad Stillmank, whose Stillmank Brewing is based here even while his flagship Wisco Disco label continues to be brewed under contract by a Milwaukee microbrewery.

Stillmank, who looks forward to moving production to Green Bay eventually, has a special treat in mind for tonight, aimed specially at beer lovers who haven’t fallen for the Madison Avenue sales pitches.

Stillmank plans to tap a keg, a firkin of old-school-style beer, made the way beer was made before more cost-effective processes took over. The firkin was filled with a modified version of Stillmank’s Wisco Disco recipe but when the beer was still “green” — flat and warm. That may not sound all that appetizing, but understand that the keg was also supplied with fresh yeast and hops, so that a secondary fermentation took place inside. It’s “live beer,” not the “dead beer” that most people are used to, so it’ll carbonate in the keg, the old-fashioned way, instead of being pumped with carbonation before kegging.

It’s the preferred method of the Campaign for Real Ale in Great Britain, whose proponents are trying to preserve and advocate centuries-old brewing techniques, from when beer was beer.

The technique is cumbersome, mostly unprofitable and a little bit unpredictable, Stillmank says.

“It’ll be extremely fresh, it’s going to pour cloudy and it’s probably not going to be quite as carbonated as you get using the mechanical process,” Stillmank says. He’s done this before, and the result is different every time.

Tasting beer that’s unfamiliar and unpredictable? What a concept. Leave it to the Clydesdales to say “neigh.”